Eric S. Edelman is a career diplomat who served as an adviser on national security to Vice President Dick Cheney during the lead up to the war in Iraq. President George W. Bush gave Edelman a recess appointment as undersecretary of defense for policy on August 9, 2005, replacing Douglas Feith, the controversial aide to Donald Rumsfeld who resigned at the end of Bush's first term.
Before his nomination in March 2005, Edelman, who was then serving as U.S. ambassador to Turkey, was considered a prime candidate for the number two spot at the State Department under Condoleezza Rice. Wrote the Washington Post's Al Kamen: "The latest name du jour for deputy secretary of state is Eric S. Edelman . who is seen as someone-perhaps the only one on the planet-who can comfortably straddle all the relevant political worlds. He's a career foreign service officer, a former ambassador to Finland who also worked for then-Secretary of State George P. Shultz and for Clinton Ambassador-at-Large Strobe Talbott. But he also worked for Defense Secretary Richard B. Cheney from 1990 to 1993 and for Vice President Cheney from 2001 to 2003 and with Secretary of State-designate Condoleezza Rice frequently when he represented Cheney at top-level meetings" (Washington Post, December 3, 2004).
Less outspoken than his predecessor at the Pentagon, Edelman also lacks the intimate connections to the hardline neoconservative advocacy world that Feith brought with him to the Defense Department. Edelman, however, is not without his political baggage.
Bush named Edelman ambassador to Turkey a few months after the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003. The Pentagon had been counting on Turkey to provide a backdoor into Iraq for its invasion force, but despite repeated entreaties by then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Ankara declined to provide the access into northern Iraq that the Pentagon coveted.
Serving at the time as Vice President Cheney's national security adviser, Edelman assumed the ambassadorship in Ankara in July 2003. It was widely speculated that Edelman was named to this key post not only because of his close ties to administration hardliners, but also because of his family connections to Turkey. Edelman's grandmother fled Russia in the early 1920s, and his mother was born in Turkey. His great uncle taught at Ankara University (Los Angeles Times, March 30, 2005; see also Edelman's State Department biography).
Edelman's two-year stay in Ankara turned into a lightning rod for deepening anti-U.S. sentiment in Turkey. The Turkish columnist Ibrahim Karagul wrote: "Edelman is probably the least-liked and trusted American ambassador in Turkish history" (quoted in K. Gajendra Singh, "U.S.-Turkish Relations Go Wobbly Now Over Syria," Al Jazeerah, March 23, 2005).
In a column for the newspaper Yeni Safak, Karagul wrote: "Considering the range of his activities, his statements which violate the decorum of democracy, and his interest in Turkey's internal affairs, Eric Edelman acts more like a colonial governor than an ambassador. Edelman's actions have exceeded his diplomatic mission. His 'interest' in nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), the Turkish media, and ethnic minorities make him go beyond his role as an ambassador. His presence here has never contributed to Turkish-American relations, and it never will. If we want to address the reasons for anti-Americanism, Edelman must be issue one. As long as Edelman stays in Turkey, the chill wind disturbing bilateral relations will last."
As the war and occupation in Iraq went badly for the United States, the U.S. government blamed Turkey for failing to join the "coalition of the willing." Defense Secretary Rumsfeld told FoxNews on March 20, 2005 that "the insurgency today would be less" if Turkey had cooperated with U.S. invasion plans. "Given the level of the insurgency today, two years later, clearly, if we had been able to get the Fourth Infantry Division in from the north through Turkey, more of the Iraqi Saddam Hussein Ba'athist regime would have been captured or killed," said Rumsfeld.
Washington also charged that Turkey viewed "liberated" Iraq with increasing hostility. As tensions with Syria increased, rather than siding with the United States, Turkey increased its contacts with the besieged regime of President Bashar al Assad. A turning point in Syrian-Turkey relations was Assad's visit to Ankara in 2004 (Reuters, March 1, 2005).
Turkey refused to support the U.S. and French demand that Syria remove all its troops from Lebanon. Many in Turkey believe that Washington has attempted to "franchise" what has been dubbed the "Cedar Revolution" in Lebanon. Stepping into the fray, Edelman said, "What can be said on Syria is that the international community is completely unanimous on UN Security Council Resolution 1559," which called on Syria immediately to withdraw its troops from Lebanon. "We hope Turkey will join the international community," said Edelman (Al Jazeerah, March 23, 2005).
Like many other top officials in the Bush administration's foreign policy team, Edelman began his government career in the Reagan administration. While completing his doctorate in history at Yale University, Edelman joined the U.S. Middle East Delegation to the West Bank/Gaza Autonomy Talks. He then became a special assistant to Secretary of State George Shultz. In 1990, Edelman moved from the State Department to the Pentagon, where he served as assistant deputy undersecretary of defense for Soviet and East European affairs.
Edelman also served under Cheney during the administration of George Bush Senior. At that time, he became part of a "shop" within the Pentagon that was set up by then-Defense Secretary Cheney "to think about American foreign policy after the Cold War, at the grand strategic level," wrote Nicholas Lehman in the New Yorker (April 1, 2002).
The work of this shop, which was headed by Paul Wolfowitz, eventually led to the drafting of the now-notorious 1992 draft Defense Planning Guidance, a document that was meant to serve as a post-Cold War framework for U.S. military strategy. Others working on the guidance were Zalmay Khalilzad and I. Lewis Libby. According to Lehman, the guidance team was "generally speaking, a cohesive group of conservatives who regard themselves as bigger-thinking, tougher-minded, and intellectually bolder than most other people in Washington." Their guidance, however, which called for actively promoting U.S. predominance throughout much of the world, proved too ambitious for Bush Senior and congressional Democrats. Although the initial draft was immediately retracted after it was leaked to the press, it would go on to serve as a framework for neoconservative advocacy during the 1990s, and many of its ideas would resurface in President George W. Bush's post-9/11 national security strategy.
During the Clinton administration, Edelman moved back to the State Department. As ambassador-at-large and special adviser to the secretary of State on the Newly Independent States, Edelman oversaw defense, security, and space issues.
Vice President Cheney brought Edelman back under his wing as principal deputy assistant for national security affairs. As an assistant to Cheney, he was part of the foreign policy network that hurriedly established the "intelligence" rationales for the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Edelman, who is reportedly close to a number high profile neoconservatives like Richard Perle, has frequently been identified as being part of an informal policy network of like-minded ideologues that was based mainly at the Pentagon and Cheney's office, but which also included key figures in the State Department, the various intelligence agencies, and the National Security Council (CounterPunch, February 27, 2003; American Prospect, April 17, 2006).
